Olha Kobylianska
Discover the Ukrainian writer whose feminist novels helped to break down gender stereotypes and to promote women's rights
Olga Kobylyanska by Olha Kobylianska. Valse Brillante, part 2 - "Game of Fate" - The series of Documentaries from VIATEL studioCFC Big Ideas in association with the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy
Olha Kobylianska is known as one of the most significant Ukrainian modernist writers and an active participant in the women’s emancipation movement.
She was mostly self-educated in a time when Ukrainian women lived under the dual burden of patriarchal traditions and tsarist Russian attempts to destroy Ukrainian cultural independence.
Olha Kobylyanska by Participants of the congress of Ukrainian writers in Lviv. Olga Kobylyanska in the center in the first row. Osyp Makovey is third from the left in the second row. Photo by WikipediaCFC Big Ideas in association with the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy
She became one of the initiators of the Association of Ruthenian Women in Bukovina, a group that brought up the problem of women's discrimination and inequality.
Kobylianska depicted the struggle between good and evil and the mystical force of nature, predestination, magic, and the irrational in many of her stories of peasant life. Her works are known for their impressionistic lyrical descriptions of nature and subtle psychological portrayals.
Olha Kobylyanska by © 2023, online magazine "UKRAINKY". All rights reserved by the copyright holderCFC Big Ideas in association with the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy
One of her most famous works about women’s happiness is A Person, the first Kobylianska's novel written in Ukrainian.
The novel Zemlia (The Land, 1902) reveals the harsh and oppressive nature of the rural peasantry life in the early XX-century Bukovina. This intellectually probing work examines how the system of private ownership leads to a world in which a brother kills a brother.
"While God gives me strength and while I am alive, I will work... It is our destiny to work since the rest that awaits for us afterward has no end." (Zemlia by Olga Kobylianska, 1902)
Text: based on text by Kateryna Nosko
Original text from the album of the Prominent Ukrainians project, published jointly by Pictoric Illustrators Club, Pavlo Gudimov Ya Gallery Art Center, Artbook Publishing House and Ukraine Crisis Media Center.
Photo:
© 2023, online magazine "UKRAINKY". All rights reserved by the copyright holder
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